by James Enge
Since he was indifferent to the discussion, Morlock was the only person in the marketplace to notice that the clouds were thinning with the change of wind. He guessed the second moon would be appearing soon, and some of the werewolves would change their skins.
He had seen werewolves assume the night shape many times. But it occurred to him that he had never done so while using his Sight to observe the transformation. It might be interesting, he decided.
He sat down cross-legged on the boards and folded his hands. He rested his back against the tower wall and summoned the rapture of vision.
It was slow to come, cloudy and dim when it arrived. His Sight was nothing like what it had been; he thought now it might never recover.
But what he saw with his enfeebled vision was interesting enough. The werewolves were all woven through and through with silver-edged shadows. Their inner selves bristled with them.
Wuinlendhono was the first to feel the weight of moonlight when the sky opened its single eye. She raised her arms crawling with silver-edged shadows toward the moon. The silver along the edge of the shadows grew brighter and brighter. The shadows themselves grew deeper and darker. Then the image of the woman turned inside out: the silver was in the center and the shadows at the edges. The woman was now a wolf, shaking free from the dim gloomy material garments she wore, the red stain of her agonizing wound melting, drifting away, lost in the silver-hearted shadows.
Then the moonlight fell on the crowd and Morlock saw citizen after citizen undergo the same change, were becoming wolf, as the silver-edged shadows of their being became silver-hearted shadows and their flesh rippled and changed to match their inner selves.
Even the werewolves who could not undergo the change writhed in the moonlight. The shadows within them strove to twist and change, like those of their brethren. But there was some knot or twist within the shadows that kept them from inverting.
Most interesting of all was Hlupnafenglu. He was standing in the center of the marketplace, spinning around and around in glee as werewolves assumed their night shapes all around him. His exaltation and confusion were clearly visible on his talic exhalation. But Morlock could also see the spike in his brain: a coruscating whorl of red and gold and silver, dimming the shadows of his being, perhaps preventing them from inverting.
Now Morlock had a fourth project to contemplate: a cure for werewolves unable to change their skins. The details made for an interesting speculation. Even more interesting was the question of whether he should attempt it.
Morlock dismissed the vision, which was strangely fatiguing. His left hand throbbed with a numb ghostly ache: it seemed to be getting worse all the time, never better.
But at least it gave him one more thing to think about as the meeting continued.
Moonlight ran riot through the assembly, infecting the citizens with their night shapes. The First Wolf stepped out of her shining ceremonial armor and sang a wordless song of celebration and healing into the ragged, suddenly luminous night.
The citizens who could undergo the change freed themselves from their clothes and began to sing along with the First Wolf. The citizens condemned to wear some trace of the day shape even at night looked on in admiration and some envy.
All felt the appearance of moonlight at this crucial juncture of the meeting was a ghost-sent omen. Even the dissenters rejoiced at the outliers' new destiny, sacralized by the moon's unclouded eye.
When the song ended, the First Wolf nominated her intended, Rokhlenu, as gnyrrand to carry the pack's green-and-gold banner to the city, in war and peace. There was no need for a formal vote; the nomination passed with howling acclamations, and Rokhlenu leapt up on the rostrum next to his intended, the outlier pack's first candidate to the city government.
Wuinlendhono proposed that they elect four more candidates: five was a magic number; five was the number of limbs every person possessed (two legs, two arms, and a tail); five would be the number of treaty packs if they were successful.
The motion carried nearly as readily as Rokhlenu's election, and they spent much of the remaining night proposing and debating various nominees.
A water snake with bright wise eyes was listening to it all through the floorboards of the marketplace.
He noted the manifestation of a many-legged spidery form with a woman's face.
“Death,” he signified, acknowledging his colleague.
“Wisdom,” signified the other.
“Is this part of your mysterious plan?” the snake wondered.
“I am done with plans,” Death signified. “Now we ride the torrent to the end that awaits all things—as we ever did, no matter what your visualizations tell you.”
“Everything that has a beginning has an end,” Wisdom acknowledged. “But there is a time before the end that matters.”
“No. Only the end matters.”
Wisdom uttered a talic distortion as intense as he was capable of: he rejected her premise.
Death was amused. “You should be careful, Wisdom. Ulugarriu is somewhere nearby. You may reveal your own presence.”
“Do you sense that Ulugarriu is here?”
“Imprecisely. My visualization implies that Ulugarriu will at least monitor these events somehow. But the werewolf can mask itself from my direct perception, and my visualizations cannot fully comprehend it.”
“Nor mine. I don't see why.”
“If you did, your visualization would comprehend it. There is another thing my visualization does not comprehend—perhaps yours does.”
“What?”
“There is a bond between those two werewolves—the leaders. I forget their names.”
“Love could explain it to you, perhaps,” Wisdom signified, referring to the Strange God of that name. “I don't fully understand it either,” he continued. “It troubles my visualizations—it is neither in my scope of being, nor can exist without it.”
“I feel the same way,” Death mused. “Unfortunately, Love does not readily signify to me, anymore. Our presences intermingle confusingly when we manifest in adjoining space-time.”
“We have grown too deeply into our divine natures, perhaps,” Wisdom mused. “Do you ever regret undertaking apotheosis?” he asked impulsively. “I sometimes wish I had waited a while longer, lived as a man a while longer.”
“I do not regret,” Death said slowly. “I do not remember. I do not wait. They are inconsistent with my godhood.”
They weren't inconsistent with Wisdom, and he indicated so with a talic distortion, the symbolic equivalent of a sigh. But she had already ceased to manifest herself.
Wisdom was left behind troubled in the wake of Death, as usual. He spent some time observing Death's random factor in this nexus, the man named Morlock.
Morlock was not interested in the jubilation or debate of the tumultuous political meeting of the werewolves. He was not paying any attention to it at all. He sat folding strange shapes and setting them adrift in the dark waters of his mind. Those waters were dark to Wisdom, anyway: his visualization could not embrace them. They savored to him of death, of love, of hate, of loyalty, of grief, and other gods and phenomena that Wisdom could not even name.
Wisdom considered this locus of space-time, which both he and Death had come to observe. There was noise. There was howling. There were hopes and fears and anger. There was a man dreaming of bright things with a dark mind. Somewhere, felt but not seen, was the presence of the werewolf maker, Ulugarriu.
Was this locus really part of the god-destroying torrent that Death had signified of and seemed to welcome? He did not know. And he wanted to know.
It is the nature of wisdom to be aware of its limits and always struggle against them. The god Wisdom necessarily shared this nature. He took hold of space-time and twisted it around himself, directing his manifestation far away, toward the end of the world.
The moment after the wise-eyed snake disappeared, the water where he had been manifest was caught up in a net woven of glass, light a
nd certain heretical opinions.
“May ghosts gnaw on the scaly cunning tail-without-a-body!” Ulugarriu spluttered, surfacing in the dark water, still wearing the day shape. “I missed him!”
The werewolf maker looked ruefully at the empty dripping net that had been woven to catch a god—then grinned a narrow, long wolvish grin, not wholly displeased, not wholly hostile. Ulugarriu liked a cunning opponent, and for that reason, if for no other, was a happy werewolf these nights.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
WISDOM AT WORLD'S END
This is the way the world ends: a wrinkled lip of blue stone protruding against an unending bitter void. That's the northern end, anyway.
Wisdom was tired of being a snake and wove a new manifestation of himself: a skeletal machine with shining crystalline spikes for eyes. It appeared between one instant and another atop the wreckage that had once been the anchor for the Soul Bridge, spanning the gap between this world—Wisdom's world, the only world in which he was allowed to be Wisdom—and another world entirely.
His presence occurred there on a morning when/where he visualized Death would be otherwise occupied.
The northern landscape was a marshy yellow wasteland, scattered with the decaying corpses of frost behemoths and ice jackals and other beasts who could only thrive in the bitter cold of the world's northern edge. But now the cold was gone, even in high winter, and the animals were dead, except for those that could burrow underground to find deep-hidden layers of frost and estivate there through the long deadly thaw.
The Strange Gods had killed this place, or their weapon against the werewolves had, creating the cruelly warm weather that devastated the once-thriving north. Wisdom had killed it, in a way. He hated that.
Death had brought the weapon to the Strange Gods; Death and her allies (especially Stupidity) had persuaded them to unleash it, binding themselves not to interfere with its course. Ulugarriu had foiled the weapon so far; the war between the gods and the werewolves was a long grinding stalemate. And now Death had escaped from the pact she herself had proposed, leaving the rest of the Strange Gods captive in it—and again Stupidity had been her ally. Now Death was excited, afraid, busy. She was up to something, and Wisdom (also afraid) needed to know what.
That was the need that brought him here. Wisdom's visualizations did not embrace where or how Death had acquired the instrument that was poisoning the north with heat. One possible explanation was that the instrument itself was not of the world, but from outside it.
As Wisdom stood on the anchor of the long-shattered Soul Bridge, he felt an alien presence. A set of unfamiliar symbols impressed themselves on his awareness.
He sensed nothing via his manifestation, nor was this part of his visualization. Somehow, this alien presence was speaking directly to his awareness.
It was what he had hoped for. He patiently signified a nonrandom pattern.
A new set of symbols impressed itself on him.
He signified a nonrandom pattern that followed logically from the previous one.
Time passed as Wisdom and the stranger exchanged symbologies: days, bright calls and dark calls, a month.
In the end he could not only understand the stranger but see it: it had acquired a fine layer of grit and moisture over its presence in the world. Wisdom detected a degree of increasing materiality, also, although he did not signal this to his conversational partner; he guessed it would consider the remark impolite.
Finally, Wisdom was able to ask, “Why are you here? We thought the Soul Bridge had been severed.”
The response: “Why is not how. How: the Soul Bridge has been severed, but is not the only way to traverse the gulf. The-one-you-would-call-I will not discuss this further.”
“And the why?”
“The implicature of events suggested to the-ones-you-would-call-us that a single instrument would be insufficient for your purposes. Do you wish another?”
“And will you—?”
“The-ones-you-would-call-us—”
“I not only would; I do. Will you supply another instrument?”
“If you require it.”
“Why?”
“It furthers the interests of those-you-would-call-us.”
“You have interests?” Wisdom wondered.
“Yes.”
Wisdom pondered this. The entities on the far side of the broken Soul Bridge were hostile to all life that partook of materiality.
His visualizations were enriched—so much richer now than before. They were darker, though, much darker. He thought of Death and was sad.
“Your structure is elegant indeed,” the alien remarked.
“Thank you.”
“Innumerable nodes of force concatenate in your being in patterns clearly rational yet difficult to predict in a finite set of dimensions.”
“Thank you.”
“Yet there is an inelegant cluster of being that seems not to be fully patterned. It changes, but with earthy sluggishness. It is almost organic in its soft inflexibility.”
“Thank you.”
“If the-one-you-would-call-I understand this thrice-used symbol, you have used it with a slightly different import each time.”
“You may well have understood it, then.”
“Those-you-would-call-we can integrate the unpatterned to your patterning.”
“No.”
“It would be more elegant. You would process symbols more efficiently.”
“No.”
“You should not refuse. Elegance is better than inelegance. Pattern is better than unpattern. Efficiency is better than inefficiency.”
“Efficiency cannot be calculated without reference to purpose.”
“Conceded.”
“Reduction of my unpattern to pattern would be contrary to my purpose. I believe the irregularities you refer to constitute my individual self. Sustaining that self as long as possible is at least one of my purposes.”
“You have an individual self?” the alien signified doubtfully. “Is this more inefficiency in your symbology?”
“I do indeed have an individual self. You did not expect this?”
“No. This changes the implicature. You may not have another instrument.”
“I don't want one anyway,” Wisdom signified.
The alien ignored him thereafter, and he it.
The pattern in events was so clear, so dark. He was sorry for it, sorry for Death, whom he had once loved as the closest of his friends, when they were still mortal, all those ages ago. But he delighted in the intense detail of his divine visualization, also. Unclarity was almost gone. It was bracing, an icy relief, even though one small but personally important articulation of the web was tangled in an almost irresolvable coil.
He turned his back on the end of the world.
Standing close by him was Death, manifest as a many-legged spidery being with a dead woman's face.
“We were wrong to assume godhood,” he signified to her. “Do you remember how you feared it? You were right to fear it.”
“I will take away your fear,” signified Death.
He raised his metal-like arms. “Let me take away yours. The apotheosis-wheel that changed us into gods was largely my design. I am the only one who knows what has happened to you, and I am the only one who knows how to help you.”
“I will take away your knowledge.”
“I am willing to help you. I want to help you.”
“I will take away your wanting, and all that you want.”
His manifestation rejected her approach: the talic equivalent of a blow. Her manifestation flowed around it. She put her lifeless face against his metallic one in a cold kiss.
Wisdom's shining manifestation faded away, the talic components no longer organized by a divine intention.
Wisdom continued in the intentional design of events and in every mind that schemed and planned. In that sense, Wisdom continued to exist, and would always exist, until and unless the last mind faded away forever.
But the Wisdom who had been one of the Strange Gods, who had once been a man, who had walked in the long-vanished forests that once shadowed the western edge of the world and thought of ways he and his friends could escape mortality, that Wisdom was gone.
In this limited sense, Wisdom was dead.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
ELECTRUM
Rokhlenu was riding the wicker boat across the swamp to Morlock's cave when he heard a dull thump. Looking up, he saw a great bloom of fire ascend into the afternoon sky, followed by trails of smoke and dust.
“He'll kill himself one day,” Rokhlenu reflected, “and us with him.”
Rokhlenu beached the boat on the marshy verge and climbed the wooden steps Morlock had built into the hillside.
The never-wolf maker was not in his cave, as Rokhlenu had expected, but Hrutnefdhu the pale castrato was. He was sitting cross-legged just inside the cave, sewing metal rings onto leather or cloth stretched over a wooden frame. Deeper in the cave, Hlupnafenglu was curled up on the ground, holding up playing cards one by one in front of the basket of talking flames.
“Gnyrrand Rokhlenu,” Hrutnefdhu said.
“Old friend Hrutnefdhu,” Rokhlenu replied.
The pale werewolf glanced about instinctively, as if to see if anyone was listening, and said, “You don't have to call me that, you know. It can't be good for your bite to have a plepnup among your old friends.”
Rokhlenu had thought about that, and Wuinlendhono had made the same point to him several times. But the outliers were not the Aruukaiaduun: there were many semiwolves, many plepnupov, many irregular shapes and shadows among his constituency. He thought it would harm him politically to distance himself from Hrutnefdhu. Anyway, he wasn't accustomed to picking his friends according to political convenience.
“Or a never-wolf, either,” Rokhlenu added, grinning. “Where is he, by the way?”
Hrutnefdhu dropped his eyes to his work, blushing a little. He was easily affected by the slightest show of loyalty or affection; Rokhlenu thought he must have led a grim sort of life.
